State Ignores Recommendation of Stem Cell Ethics Committee
It is fun and satisfying to pick on local political figures, and my fellow citizen journalists here at MonroeRising have done a commendable job as of late. And as much as I would like to pile on, I need to bring some attention to an unrelated story that seems to have slipped through the cracks.
You probably were not aware that Governor Steamroller created the Empire State Stem Cell Board last year to use taxpayer dollars ($600 million over the next 10 years) to fund stem cell research. Some have questioned the wisom of spending so much money on such a narrow category of research. Even more important, however, are the serious moral implications of creating embryos in a laboratory for the sole purpose of experimentation.
Clearly, intelligent and well intentioned individuals reside on both sides of the debate regarding embryonic stem cell research. However, it is a failure of a representative government to fund practices that a significant proportion of the population find to be abhorrent. Why should my taxpayer dollars be spent to fund research over which I have serious moral qualms?
The story only goes downhill from here. Recognizing the moral implications involved (or at very least, paying lip service to those who do), the Stem Cell Fund legislation created an Ethics Committee to review grant proposals submitted to the Board for funding. However, the Ethics Committee only has the power to make nonbinding recommendations. Thus, if the Board wanted to fund attempts to create a super-intelligent race of monkey men, the Ethics committee would be powerless to stop the money from flowing. But at least the Ethics committee could recommend that this was a very bad idea.
Apparently, even that is too much power. A few weeks ago, a member of the Ethics Committee wrote a scathing editorial in the New York Post, where he reported as follows:
“At the first ethics-committee gathering on Nov. 30, we were given just two hours to suggest ‘interim ethical guidelines.’
Despite this pressure, we developed a reasonable plan: Delay funding for controversial practices to allow time for ethical review, while awarding grants for non-controversial practices (such as research on stem cells from adults and from umbilical-cord blood, as well as on stem-cell lines already derived from embryos).
Ethics-committee members hold diverse views on the controversial kinds of stem-cell research. Nonetheless, the committee unanimously recommended that the board hold off on funding these practices for six months so that the committee could examine these thorny ethical issues carefully and recommend guidelines.
The ethics committee thought that ethics mattered.
But perhaps ethics doesn’t matter much in New York. The board’s funding committee, composed almost exclusively of scientists and advocates for embryonic-stem-cell research, agreed on ambiguous guidelines that permit all the controversial practices noted above: cloning, chimeras, parthenogenesis and creating human embryos solely for research.
The ethics committee’s sensible plan of ethical due diligence proved intolerable to the funding committee. It argued that even temporary limits would ’send the wrong message to scientists.’ “
Since that time, the Board spent $14.5 million to fund its first round of grants, and more spending will follow. Unfortunately, no one seems to care that the Board steamrolled over the objections of the Ethics Committee. Who cares what the state health commissioner, the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse, and the President Emeritus of Roswell Park Cancer Institute think about these issues; I’m sure they’re just religious extremists.
It goes without saying that the Democrat and Chronicle failed to even address this story (even the sub-par Albany Times Union ran a story just last week.). To be fair, there are much more weighty issues to addess - like yesterday’s front page story, titled “Ready for Takeoff,” about how local “airline passengers are getting the message about how to pack carry-on luggage correctly.”
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